Martha Gellhorn is a gentleperson. For 42 pages in ["Travels with Myself and Another"] she writes about an Unwilling Companion on her trip into China's interior in 1941, always referring to him as U. C. and never mentioning that he was in fact her husband, Ernest Hemingway. This—at a time when to have been Hemingway's wife … seems excuse enough to publish every possible remembrance of the great man—entitles Miss Gellhorn to a medal, at least. But her excellence does not stop there. She renders U. C. justice: she makes him a sympathetic as well as amusing figure, although perhaps a wee bit maddening….

U. C. apart, Miss Gellhorn can be exceedingly funny on her own. Often, reading of her travels—in China of course, the Caribbean …, Russia and Israel, to name the headliners—I chuckled in a ladylike, repressed manner, but sometimes I had to stop to laugh...